Letter: Proposed pipeline from Canada is 'pure lunacy'

Editor: Recently a train derailed in Northern Minnesota, splitting open a tanker car that spilled approximately 30,000 gallons of crude oil over the Northern Plains. Imagine if 10 tanker cars derailed spilling 300,000 gallons of crude oil across some of the most important and fragile ecosystems in the United States. What you don’t know is that hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil carried in 100 car tanker trains crisscross the United States every day. Imagine the millions of acres of watershed and prairie lands that will be destroyed for decades when the inevitable major train wreck takes place.

Now imagine when a 3,000 mile pipeline running fro Canada to the Gulf of Mexico ruptures. Hard to imagine, yes, but possible even probable. Piping the highest carbon producing lowest grade of crude oil from Canada to the Gulf for overseas sale is pure lunacy. The pipeline project must be stopped and monies invested into the continuing efforts to develop alternative energy.

If we can put a man on the moon and transplant hearts and kidneys and produce the medical miracles we are achieving every day then surely we can find a way to power our cars and heat our homes that isn’t killing the very planet we live on.

Perhaps rather than worrying about the government stealing your grandchildren’s inheritance, it would be more useful to consider if they will have breathable air 30 years from now.

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I am not well informed on this topic but, seeing as fossil fuels are here to stay (at least for now), doesn't it make sense to consider:
1. decreasing dependence on oil from the middle east for many obvious reasons
2. negotiating with friendly countries that share a common culture and continent
3. reduce oil imports (and thus some transports) via ship- aren't ocean spills harder to clean up and affect more fragile ecosystems upon which much of the world depends? Wouldn't a pipeline be a safer way to transport than even train?
4. How about investing in energy strategies that actually offer a financial return to our struggling economy?

The network of crude oil pipelines in the U.S. is extensive. There are approximately 55,000 miles of crude oil trunk lines (usually 8 - 24 inches in diameter) in the U.S. that connect regional markets. I seriously doubt if one more will make that much of a difference or produce that much of a risk. The technology today is much better than in the past so it stands to reason that the XL Pipeline will be a lot safer than some of the older ones. We need this pipeline both for the oil and for the jobs. The rabid evrironmentalists have hindered this country's growth for too long with their "the sky is falling" mentality and need to simmer down. We need to drill for more of our own energy, gas and oil, so we can create more jobs and free our dependence from oil originating in countries that don't like us very much. Green energy will eventually arrive, but not for many more years. Our government has foolishly wasted too much of the taxpayer's money financing the banckruptcies of various green energy companies. Let the private venture capitalists finance these companies, which they will do when the technology is right!

If we can put a man on the man on the moon and transplant vital organs, then surely we can build a simple pipeline to safely transport oil across the country.

But they haven't and they wont. TransCanada CEO Hal Kvisle exclaimed in 2010 that the XL pipeline would be the safest in the US. 1 year and 12 spills later, that's very much in doubt.

In every scenario studied, with or without KXL, the excess cross-border pipeline capacity persists until after 2020. In scenarios where high pipeline capacity to the British Columbia coast – and thence Asia – is assumed built, the excess cross-border capacity into the U.S.A. is projected as continuing until 2025 or even 2030.

In the recent Arkansas spill, many are pointing to aged pipes as one of the main causes. Its not a matter of if there will be a spill, it's when. There is plenty of data including that from the company that show the estimated number of spills per year. Sadly tar sand is nearly impossible to clean from bodies of water because of its makeup. This causes the crude to sink. We have now assumed the roll of cleanup through a superfund from the 2010 spill because the company refuses to continue to do so. 5 years before the spill, the company was made aware of 15,000 cracks in the pipeline. Enbridge pipelines suffered more than 800 spills between 1999 and 2010, of which, the Talmidge Creek/Kalamazoo River spill was the worst. The NTSB report said that the problem, however, was not one of just cracks and deteriorating infrastructure, but it was a problem of "deficient integrity management programs."

Not only did management choose to not address the cracks in comprehensive manner, but when the spill occurred workers were inadequately trained to identify the problem and twice tried to restart the pipe causing the majority of the spill. Then of course there would be the issue of deregulation. "Delegating too much authority to the regulated to assess their own system risks and correct them is tantamount to the fox guarding the hen house," Deborah Hersman, chairman of the NTSB, said in their study, they clearly show that not only did the company have a good share of the blame but federal regulators were to blame as well.